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Canon EF Mount, Fixed Focal Length Lens, Focus: Autofocus, Max Aperture: f/1.2, 8 Elements in 7 Groups, Filter size: 72 mm, Weight... |  |
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| Product Reviews from Amazon.com (Rating System 1 to 5) |
| Review | Rating | Last Updated | The sharpest canon lens on the market to date
I am a huge fan of this lens - both on my full frame body (canon 1dsmkiii) and on my crop chip backup camera (40D).
Besides the fact that this lens is super expensive... it is probably the best canon lens made today.
It is by far - the sharpest lens - I have ever used on the canon line... and probably one of the top 5 sharpest lenses I have ever used in any camera system.
Not just sharp - two stops up from wide open... but sharp - wide open.
I was shooting a party at a bowling alley. Disco bowling. So it was mostly dark - and there were disco lights and fog and all sorts of distractions. This lens performed flawlessly and autofocused fast and correct almost all the time.
When using this lens in a regular light situation - it could be useful to put a neutral density filter on it... and shoot it wide open for the most beautiful bokeh that the canon line has to offer.
Upsides: sharp, great colors, amazing bokeh
downsides: heavy, expensive, and not a zoom. | 5 | Today | This is a single purpose lens but ....
it does it really really really well.
The lens is expensive, you can buy 5 85 f/1.8 for 1 85 f/1.2.
The lens is heavy and fat.
You could use it as an indoor sport lens since it a f/1.2, but the 70-200 f/2.8 IS is more useful, since it focuses quicker and the range is more useful.
You can use it as a walking around lens, but 24-70 f/2.8 is a better choice.
Macro, the 100 f/2.8 macro is more suitable and only 1/5 of the price.
Is it worth the money?
It depends.
It's a difficult lens to work with.
As others have noted, the DOF is incredibly thing.
Most don't really need f/1.2.
No you buy this lens for only one purpose.
Bar none it is the best portrait lens out there.
The bokeh and sharpness is stunning.
| 5 | Today | Ditto, great lens
I have 70-200 2.8, 24-70 2.8, 16-35 2.8 and this lens. This being my only prime is great. Can't say enough about what this lens will do. DOF needs to be watched you can get a focused tip of the nose and out of focus eyes even with someone with a small nose :-) | 5 | Today | Great lens for portraits
This is a great lens, especially for portraits. However, I feel it's a bit too expensive so I can't give it a 5 star rating due to the price.
The MKII version focuses certainly a lot faster which is nice however if you already have the MKI version, it's probably not worth it to upgrade. I did but I do shoot professionally and can write it off on my taxes. I definitely notice that it's faster. Now I can focus at a slow speed rather than a glacial speed.
This is a serious lens in every way. It's heavy, expensive but can yield some awesome results. | 4 | Today | Excellent lens if you know what you're doing
This is not a beginner lens. In fact, even experienced shooters will take some time to get used to this lens. But if you know what you're doing, it can produce some amazing shots.
The key feature of this lens is of course it's very wide aperture creating a very narrow DoF. Which means your focus needs to be spot on. I found that this is one of those lenses where your results are best if you shoot with a single, selected focus point. It's also one of the lenses where the 1DM3/1DsM3 microadjustments for focus may be worth undertaking.
The challenge with this lens is the slow AF, because its front focusing. It won't track a moving person very well. It's also a heavy lens - even though it's a prime lens, it weighs more than most zooms. But chances are if you're considering this lens, you also have one of the bigger and heavier full frame bodies.
As such if you hope to use this lens as a everyday multi-purpose lens you will be disappointed. But if you use it for a narrow range: portraits or other objects which don't move much, and benefit from a very narrow DoF, this is a fabolous lens. | 5 | Today | I now have too many clients!
I now have too many clients because of this lens and no longer have time to update or make changes to my review so I took all of it off except this intro and the pros and cons. Also I now have to supply my clients with a photographers release as most places say a pro must have shot these you must have a photographers release. These are great problems I never had before purchasing this lens.
The ultimate portrait lens
Pros:
Super Bokeh
Great lens hood
Too many clients!!
Super low light event lens
Best portrait lens for women and girls ever made
Shoot outside at night with no tripod at 3200 ISO!
Amazing looking photos that say professional all over them.
Along with my Canon 135 F2 lens the finest portrait lens in the world!
Sharp wide open in the center with wonder halo effect around outside
Sharp edge to edge by F2.0
Cons:
Price
Heavy! 1,025 Grams
Exposed rear element
No focus lock and recompose! It's always out of focus
Removal procedure (1 manual focus, 2 focus to infinity, 3 camera Off)
Battery Hog!! I only get 300 - 360 shots or so with Canon 40D 200 with Rebel XTi
Install procedure (carefully line up without seeing red dot and protect rear element)
Some CA (Chromatic Aberration) wide open totally gone when stopped down to 1.8 not an issue with most portrait photos
Lens I currently own:
Canon EF-S 17-55 F/2.8 IS Ultra sharp, great colors, great low light, poor zoom action
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Rebel XTi Kit lens Muddy, slow, pile of junk
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L Fantastic colors, pretty sharp, ultra smooth zoom action, light weight
Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L Fantastic colors and contrast, sharp, zoom a little stiff at first, heavy!
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Good budget portrait lens, light weight, disposable, sharp from F/2.5
Canon EF 85mm F/1.2 L II The best portrait lens for female and children clients, buttery smooth Bokeh, heavy and expensive it shares sharpness with 135mm
Canon EF 135mm F/2.0 L The best portrait lens for males and tied with Canon 85mm F 1/.2 for sharpest lens I own, buttery smooth Bokeh
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L fantastic colors, sharp for a zoom, very versatile ego boosting and attention getting and heavy!
My next lens purchase I'm saving for right now:
Canon EF 300mm F/2.8 IS L the finest lens ever made by Canon | 5 | Today | Know in advance, this lens is HEAVY
Heavy! Yes, but it is "picture-perfect." You want fantastic bokeh (background blur) this is for you. You can drop this down and take indoor pictures without a lens in most situations. This is a wonderful lens, although canon does charge and arm and a leg for it. One could argue this is the best lens in the Canon lineup and they could back it up with reasonable arguments. Maybe it is not the best, maybe it is, either way, this lens allows you to take wonderful pictures in situations where very few other lenses could even attempt to capture a good image. I love this lens for those situations which call for it. I don't regret spending the extra money over the 1.8f version, as I find it worth every extra penny (dollars$$$)! Buy and enjoy and you can separate yourself from others by showing background blur that some photogs droll over. | 5 | Today | A journey into the masterful
I've only been using it for a short while and I can already say that this lens is going to take me a bit to master. Still, it's very forgiving when not wide open and I'm really liking the results so far! Unbelievably sharp, excellent bokeh, good feel. Heavy, but balanced (on a 40D). Manually focusing is a bit clumsy, but with a chunk of glass this large, I can see why the internals are so "precise and micro" for the focus.
Like others have said... at wide open (f/1.2) and even at ISO 100, it's easy to blow out your shots. At night, this lens belongs at 1.2, but by day, it's best when stopped down a bit. This lens will make you learn to be comfortable in manual mode.
Regrets? NONE! | 5 | Today | Great specialized glass; still room for improvement.
The Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM lens is a very heavy (1025 grams or 2.25 lbs), very well built lens. It comes packaged with the appropriate hood, the Canon ES-7911. You get both a lens cap and a mount cap, all packed inside tight conformal foam to protect the lens during shipping. There's also a very brief manual and the usual warranty paperwork.
The 85mm specification is for a full-frame camera; with an APS-C size sensor like the one in my EOS 40D, this is multiplied by 1.6 to an effective 136mm.
The lens offers AF and manual focus. However, the manual focus is electronically driven from the focus ring to the AF motor system, which has several consequences. First, you can't focus when the camera is off. Second, the rate of focus is limited by the speed of the focus motor. Third, focus adjustments are extremely precise, essentially free of backlash and drift. The first two issues are negatives, but in my view, they are more than outweighed by the third. For instance, I often take images of the night sky; in order to do this, the lens can be AF-focused on something in the sky (I've been using Mars recently for this), and then it can be put into manual focus where the focus will remain correct and constant as long as the camera and lens temperatures do not change significantly. This is the only lens I own that has stable enough focus hardware to be able to do this. The focus ring is broad and well-textured, and a pleasure to use. There is a second textured area on the lens barrel, closer to the camera, that you can mistake for the focus ring - this area is meant to assist you in mounting and unmounting the lens. I've learned to avoid it. Manual focus is precise and moving the ring results in a fine enough focus change that when you blow a shot, you can be absolutely certain the lens wasn't to blame.
The AF/Manual switch is in a reasonable location, close to the camera body. There is a range indication on the barrel of the lens behind a transparent window which serves to keep debris out of the workings of the lens.
I have found that after you focus, if you change the f-stop, the lens does move a little off-focus; it is slight but definite. So take care to re-focus if you change f-stops.
While I'm thinking about how AF acts with this lens, one thing I definitely noticed was that at f/1.2, the camera can AF in almost any situation. I can AF on single stars, faint skin detail, all kinds of things that were impossible with my f/1.8 wide open, which all in all is a very pleasant experience.
The lens lacks any form of image stabilization. On the one hand, looking at the sheer size of the optical components used to construct this lens, one is tempted to sympathize with Canon - IS would be quite a technical challenge if we want to keep all that great light gathering capability. On the other, IS is showing up in more and more places, and for the price... well, let's just say that perhaps this is one of the justifications for building IS into the camera body instead of the lens. One last point is that since the lens is inherently very fast, perhaps there is less overall need for IS (though that argument falls apart the first time you *do* need it!)
Mounting: The red alignment dot is poorly located - it is on the camera-mount end of the lens where the lens approaches the body of the camera; this location makes it impossible to see when the lens is close to, but not yet mounted on, the camera body. It is a raised physical dot, which is good, but the location is a problem. I consider this a fairly serious error on Canon's part, as this is a *very* expensive lens, and I prefer to have the lens mounting process as smooth and crunch-free as possible. Hopefully they'll move the dot in the next version of the lens. I added a similarly sized dot (just a sticker) on the barrel of my lens orthogonal to the mounting indicator on the camera body, and that helps a lot.
The lens takes a 72mm filter, and I've been using it with the Canon UV haze filter. The lens is simply too valuable to risk shooting with the optics exposed.
Although the lens is very heavy, there is no tripod mount; apparently, because the lens is (relatively) short, Canon feels that the balance is still mainly at the camera body end. I'm not entirely sure I agree, but it isn't a huge issue.
The available f-stops range from f/1.2 wide open to f/16.0 fully stopped down. This is something to keep in mind if you may need considerable depth of field - you should being another lens along. This lens really does specialize in largish f-stop settings -- it cannot stand in for the f/32 you can get out of Canon's $70 f/1.8 lens, for instance -- if you find you need that kind of depth of field, you'll be putting the f/1.2L right back in the bag.
Because the f/1.2 aperture setting lets in so much light, you will likely find that you have to be very careful in order not to overexpose your subjects in normal daylight, even at the fastest shutter speeds (my EOS 40D can do 1/8000th - and that's not fast enough in many situations, even with ISO 100 set.) You'll be looking for shady areas with dark backdrops before you get comfortable with this kind of light sensitivity outdoors during the day. Otherwise, you'll have to stop down or change lenses.
Wide open, the lens' bokeh will serve you well if you provide enough depth behind your subject for it to really blur things out. While it does provide a quality blur, you won't see items directly behind someone's head turn into unidentifiable smears; they have to be considerably further away for that to happen. Even so, the portion of the depth of field that actually *is* in sharp focus is very shallow indeed.
For portraits, frankly, I find the f/1.2 setting can be too limiting and I end up stopping the lens down a few steps, where it behaves much more reasonably, or else taking advantage of my camera's many megapixels and backing off far enough to deepen the in-focus region in exchange for the area of the sensor that actually contains the portrait. The keys here are (a) you need a high MP camera so you have sensor area to trade away and (b) you need room to back off - not everyone has a deep studio. Given that care is taken to manage these DOF issues, in my opinion, this lens is quite literally unmatched as a portrait lens.
When shooting subjects that do not demand a lot of depth variance, such as my night sky images I mentioned earlier, this lens brings great sharpness, consistent focus and huge light sensitivity to the table. This application is why I bought it, and so for me, the lens has been a great success. Previously, shooting with an f/1.8 lens, I would often get star trailing. Now I can shoot pitch black sky images with deeply exposed star colors in 3 seconds or even less if I push the ISO hard; this eliminates all solar, sidereal and planetary motion, so I am well satisfied. Shooting distant landscapes provides a similar experience, but again, is difficult in daylight unless the lens is stopped down. The key hours of pre-dawn and post-sunset are times of great opportunity with this lens.
At f/1.2, the lens is already very sharp. It reaches peak sharpness everywhere at f/4, but achieves sharpness in the central image portion at f/1.8 and holds it all the way through f/4. There's very little chromatic aberration, certainly nothing to be concerned about. On my camera (APS-C sensor, remember) you can see vignetting of .6 to .7 EV at f/1.2; this is, as I understand it, basically unavoidable with this amount of glass. As you stop the lens down, this drops off, and by f/2.8 it is essentially invisible. I have been unable to detect any geometric distortion at all, the lens is near-perfect in that regard. Squares come out square, circles are circular, no little aspect weirdnesses to catch your eye, even at the edges of images.
The lens construction is metal; eight elements in seven groups, featuring one aspherical and two higher-refractive elements. They did some work to improve near-field focus performance and reduce coma. There are eight blades involved in the aperture mechanism. All in all, it is extremely solid and feels reliable, repeatable and precise, plus it sits in my hand like it always belonged there; perhaps *that* is why Canon didn't provide a tripod mount on the lens - it would have been uncomfortable.
I carry the lens deeply nested in a large camera bag (a Tamrac 5612 Pro 12, *highly* recommended); I rarely put the lens on the camera until I am ready to use it, and when I am done, I take it right back off, cap it, and bag it without wasting any time or motion. I do both the assembly and disassembly in the bag, using the bag top to shield the camera and lens from the wind and environment as best I can manage. It's the size of the investment that drives this behavior, of course; a lens like this deserves -- demands -- great care and that is just what I give it.
For the price, I expected a great deal from this lens, and after using it for a while, I feel like I actually got what I paid for. You have to temper that with the natural inclination for anyone, including me, to want to justify having spent this much money on a single prime lens; I try not to think that way, but there's no question about it, the price makes you *really* want this lens to "be all that." The best way to judge is how you feel about the pictures you take - did you get what you wanted there? In my case, I can answer yes without any hesitation, and I think that is the bottom line.
| 5 | Today | Gray market item
The lens itself was perfect, amazing, exactly what it should be. There were 3 small scratches on the lens hood and more bothersome was that the lens was a gray market lens and WAS NOT marked as such in the sales listing as it should have been. (See below for gray market vs USA lens link and explanation.)
As a professional photographer, I needed the US warranty so I returned the lens and purchased from another site that clearly marks items as USA or gray market.
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Canon-Lenses/Gray-Market.aspx
The "USA" Canon lenses are imported to the US by Canon USA. "USA" Canon lenses' warranties are supported by any Canon service facility worldwide. They are also eligible for Canon lens rebates - these rebates usually require the USA warranty card found in the Canon USA lens box. Gray Market Canon lenses are imported by the retailer or their import agent. They are not covered by the manufacturer's warranty. | 5 | Today |
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